The last 100 years have seen a huge change in the global structure of the human population, with the majority of people now living in urban rather than rural environments. An assumed consequence is that people will have fewer experiences of nature, and this could have important consequences given the myriad health benefits that they can gain from such experiences. Alternatively, as experiences of nature become rarer, people might be more likely actively to seek them out, mitigating the negative effects of urbanisation. In this study, we used data for 3,000 survey respondents from across the UK, and a nature-dose framework, to determine whether (a) increasing urbanisation is associated with a decrease in the frequency, duration and intensity of nature dose; and (b) differences in nature exposure associated with urbanisation impact on four population health outcomes (depression, self-reported health, social cohesion and physical activity). We found negative exponential relationships between nature dose and the degree of urbanisation. The frequency and duration of dose decreased from rural to suburban environments, followed by little change with further increases in urbanisation. There were weak but positive associations between frequency and duration of dose across all four health domains, while different dimensions of dose showed more positive associations with specific health domains in towns and cities. We show that people in urban areas with a low nature dose tend to have worse health across multiple domains, but have the potential for the greatest gains from spending longer in nature, or living in green areas.

1. Globally, many ecosystems are exposed to artificial light at night. Nighttime lighting has direct biological impacts on species at all trophic levels. However, the effects of artificial light on biotic interactions remain, for the most part, to be determined.

2. We exposed experimental mesocosms containing combinations ofgrassland plants and invertebrate herbivores and predators to illumination at night over a three-year period to simulate conditions under differentcommon forms of street lighting.

4. White LED lighting decreased the abundance ofa generalist herbivore mollusc by 55% in the presence of a visual predator, but not in its absence, while monochromatic amber light (with a peak wavelength similar to low pressure sodium lighting) decreased abundance of a specialistherbivore aphid (by 17%) by reducing the cover and flower abundance of its main food plant in the system. Artificialwhite light also significantly increased the food plant’s foliar carbon to nitrogen ratio.

5. We conclude that exposureto artificial light at night can trigger ecological effects spanning trophic levels, and that the nature of such impacts depends on the wavelengths emitted by the lighting technology employed.

6. Policy implications. Our results confirm that artificial light at night, at illuminance levels similar to roadside vegetation, can have population effectsmediated by both top-down and bottom-up effects on ecosystems. Given the increasing ubiquity of light pollution at night, these impacts may be widespread in the environment. These results underline the importance of minimising ecosystem disruption by reducing light pollution in natural and semi-natural ecosystems.

The ﬁeld of ecology has focused on understanding characteristics of natural systems in a manner as free as possible from biases of human observers. However, demand is growing for knowledge of human–nature interactions at the level of individual people. This is particularly driven by concerns around human health consequences due to changes in positive and negative interactions. This requires attention to the biased ways in which people encounter and experience other organisms. Here we deﬁne such a ‘personalised ecology’, and discuss its connections to other aspects of the ﬁeld. We propose a framework of focal research topics, shaped by whether the unit of analysis is a single person, a single population, or multiple populations, and whether a human or nature perspective is foremost.

We quantify the contribution of alien species to the total breeding population numbers, biomass and energy use of an entire taxonomic assemblage at a large spatial scale, using data on British birds from 1997 and 2013. A total of 216 native and 16 alien bird species were recorded as breeding in Great Britain across the two census years. Only 2.8-3.7% of British breeding bird individuals were alien, but alien species co-opted 11.9-13.8% of the energy used by the assemblage, and contributed 19.1-21.1% of assemblage biomass. Neither the population sizes nor biomasses of native and alien species differed, on average, in either census, but alien species biomass is higher than native species biomass for a given population size. Species richness underestimates the potential effects of alien bird species in Britain, which have disproportionately high overall biomass and population energy use. The main driver of these effects is the ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus), which comprised 74–81% of alien biomass, yet the breeding population of this species is still only a small fraction of the estimated 35 million birds released in the UK in autumn. The biomass of this release exceeds that of the entire breeding avifauna, and suggests that the pheasant should have an important role in structuring the communities in which it is embedded.

1. With climate change leading to poleward range expansion of species, populations are exposed to new daylength regimes along latitudinal gradients. Daylength is a major factor affecting insect life cycles and activity patterns, so a range shift leading to new daylength regimes is likely to affect population dynamics and species interactions; however, the impact of daylength in isolation on ecological communities has not been studied so far.

2. Here, we tested for the direct and indirect effects of two different daylengths on the dynamics of experimental multitrophic insect communities. We compared the community dynamics under “southern” summer conditions of 14.5‐hr daylight to “northern” summer conditions of 22‐hr daylight.

3. We show that food web dynamics indeed respond to daylength with one aphid species (Acyrthosiphon pisum) reaching much lower population sizes at the northern daylength regime compared to under southern conditions. In contrast, in the same communities, another aphid species (Megoura viciae) reached higher population densities under northern conditions.

4. This effect at the aphid level was driven by an indirect effect of daylength causing a change in competitive interaction strengths, with the different aphid species being more competitive at different daylength regimes. Additionally, increasing daylength also increased growth rates in M. viciae making it more competitive under summer long days. As such, the shift in daylength affected aphid population sizes by both direct and indirect effects, propagating through species interactions. However, contrary to expectations, parasitoids were not affected by daylength.

5. Our results demonstrate that range expansion of whole communities due to climate change can indeed change interaction strengths between species within ecological communities with consequences for community dynamics. This study provides the first evidence of daylength affecting community dynamics, which could not be predicted from studying single species separately.

Light is fundamental to biological systems, affecting the daily rhythms of bacteria, plants, and animals. Artificial light at night (ALAN), a ubiquitous feature of urbanization, interferes with these rhythms and has the potential to exert strong selection pressures on organisms living in urban environments. ALAN also fragments landscapes, altering the movement of animals into and out of artificially lit habitats. Although research has documented phenotypic and genetic differentiation between urban and rural organisms, ALAN has rarely been considered as a driver of evolution. We argue that the fundamental importance of light to biological systems, and the capacity for ALAN to influence multiple processes contributing to evolution, makes this an important driver of evolutionary change, one with the potential to explain broad patterns of population differentiation across urban–rural landscapes. Integrating ALAN’s evolutionary potential into urban ecology is a targeted and powerful approach to understanding the capacity for life to adapt to an increasingly urbanized world.

Artificial light has transformed the nighttime environment of large areas of the earth, with 88% of Europe and almost 50% of the United States experiencing light-polluted night skies. The consequences for ecosystems range from exposure to high light intensities in the vicinity of direct light sources to the very widespread but lower lighting levels further away. While it is known that species exhibit a range of physiological and behavioural responses to artificial nighttime lighting, there is a need to gain a mechanistic understanding of whole ecological community impacts, especially to different light intensities. Using a mesocosm field experiment with insect communities, we determined the impact of intensities of artificial light ranging from 0.1 to 100 lux on different trophic levels and interactions between species. Strikingly, we found the strongest impact at low levels of artificial lighting (0.1 to 5 lux), which led to a 1.8 times overall reduction in aphid densities. Mechanistically, artificial light at night increased the efficiency of parasitoid wasps in attacking aphids, with twice the parasitism rate under low light levels compared to unlit controls. However at higher light levels, parasitoid wasps spent longer away from the aphid host plants, diminishing this increased efficiency. Therefore aphids reached higher densities under increased light intensity as compared to low levels of lighting where they were limited by higher parasitoid efficiency. Our study highlights the importance of different intensities of artificial light in driving the strength of species interactions and ecosystem functions.

Determining how much biodiversity is captured by protected areas (PAs) can play a key role in meeting country commitments to international agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, while analysing gaps in species coverage by PAs can greatly contribute to better locating new PAs and conserving species. It is troublesome, however, that regardless of their importance, global gap analyses have only been conducted for major taxonomic groups of vertebrates, such as amphibians, birds and mammals. Here we present the first global gap analysis for a complete plant group, the highly threatened Cactaceae. Using geographic distribution data of 1438 cactus species we assessed how well the current PA network represents them. Additionally, we performed systematic conservation planning analyses to identify priority conservation areas for cactus species that met and failed to meet conservation targets accounting for their conservation status. We found a total of 261 species with no coverage by PAs. Our results show that a greater percentage of cacti species (18%) are lacking such protection than for mammals (9.7%) and birds (5.6%), and there is also a greater percentage of threatened cacti species (32%) outside protected areas than for amphibians (26.5%), birds (19.9%) and mammals (16%). We found that the top 17% of the landscape that best captures covered species represents on average 52.9% of species ranges and half of its extent is distributed across 14 PAs. The priority areas for the gap and the unprotected ranges of partially‐gap species captured on average 75.2% of their ranges, of which 100 were threatened gap species. These findings, paired with knowledge of the threats affecting species, give important information better to plan conservation action for cacti and also support the importance of assessing the representation of major groups such as plants in determining the real performance of the current PA network.

Recent advances in unmanned aerial system (UAS) sensed imagery, sensor quality/size, and geospatial image processing can enable UASs to rapidly and continually monitor coral reefs, to determine the type of coral and signs of coral bleaching. This paper describes an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing methodology to increase the efﬁciency and accuracy of existing surveillance practices. The methodology uses a UAV integrated with advanced digital hyperspectral, ultra HD colour (RGB) sensors, and machine learning algorithms. This paper describes the combination of airborne RGB and hyperspectral imagery with in-water survey data of several types in-water survey of coral under diverse levels of bleaching. The paper also describes the technology used, the sensors, the UAS, the ﬂight operations, the processing workﬂow of the datasets, the methods for combining multiple airborne and in-water datasets, and ﬁnally presents relevant results of material classiﬁcation. The development of the methodology for the collection and analysis of airborne hyperspectral and RGB imagery would provide coral reef researchers, other scientists, and UAV practitioners with reliable data collection protocols and faster processing techniques to achieve remote sensing objectives.